


Leave The Past In The Bottom Of The Grave They Dug For You

by Angel Ascending (angel_in_ink)



Series: Short and Sweet (Fics of About 1000 Words or Less) [4]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Amnesia Molly is Canon Now, Campaign 2 (Critical Role), Character Study, Crawling out of a grave and doing just fine, Gen, Let The Past Be Past, Memory Loss, Spoilers for Episode 14 of Campaign 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 06:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14303019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_in_ink/pseuds/Angel%20Ascending
Summary: The first thing he remembered was dirt in his mouth, in his throat, in his eyes, dirt and darkness. Before that there was nothing. Later, in dreams, there would be things that might have been fragments of memory, faces, voices, feelings, but his first real, solid memory was earth pressing down upon him. If the grave hadn’t been so shallow, (it was a grave, he had crawled out of a grave, he had woken up dead) if his panicked clawing hadn’t broken through the earth to the air above, he would have died again. Instead he crawled out of the ground, took the first breath of fresh air that he could remember, and cried.





	Leave The Past In The Bottom Of The Grave They Dug For You

**Author's Note:**

> It's 3 am and I am full of feelings.
> 
> So Liam was wearing a shirt several episodes ago that said. “Leave them at the bottom of the grave they dug for you.” I love the hell out of that quote and I wrote it down for a possible future Caleb fic, but turns out with a little tweaking, it suits this work just fine.

The first thing he remembered was dirt in his mouth, in his throat, in his eyes, dirt and darkness. Before that there was nothing. Later, in dreams, there would be things that might have been fragments of memory, faces, voices, feelings, but his first real, solid memory was earth pressing down upon him. If the grave hadn’t been so shallow, ( _it was a grave, he had crawled out of a grave, he had woken up dead)_ if his panicked clawing hadn’t broken through the earth to the air above, he would have died again. Instead he crawled out of the ground, took the first breath of fresh air that he could remember, and cried.

************

Weeks passed in flashes like half remembered dreams. The carnival found him, wandering along the road, covered in dirt, mumbling one word over and over again. “Empty.” Later, when he gave himself a name, he made sure that he had the initials M.T. Empty. Gallows humor. Grave humor.

He had forgotten whoever he had been, but he hadn’t forgotten _everything._ He knew he was a tiefling. He knew how to walk and feed himself and tie his boots. He didn’t talk much at first, but he remembered language, the common one everyone spoke and the other one, the hissing, snarling one that scared people. He knew the names of plants and colors and animals. He knew that the large, white birds that flew in the sky along the shoreline were called mollymauks, and that some believed that they were the ghosts of sailors. It felt right to name himself after those birds. More grave humor.

Mollymauk, (Molly to his friends) remembered gods. He remembered the Moonweaver, goddess of moonlight and misdirection, remembered Her commandments. “ Walk unbridled and untethered, finding and forging new memories and experiences.” Well, he didn’t have a choice, did he now? It was freeing, really. He could be whoever he wanted to be, could build a persona from whole cloth, as it were. The only clues to who he had been were the strange red marks that looked like eyes, on his hand, his arm, his neck. Whatever they were, they didn’t take ink, but he surrounded the marks with tattoos, hid them as best he could. He didn’t know what they were, and he didn’t want to know.

Two months after he clawed his way out of the ground, Molly cut himself on one of the cheap swords he had been trying to juggle, and had watched as the blood on the blade turned to ice. He had spent the rest of the day in the corner of his tent, away from prying eyes, cutting himself over and over again, on glass, on metal, whatever he could find, watching the ice form. He had spent the night bandaging himself, shaking, scared for the first time since he had climbed out of his own grave. He kept the swords, cheap as they were and poorly balanced, but stuck to fortune telling, and tried not to give himself paper cuts with his cards.

**********

Molly had immediately been drawn to Yasha when she arrived, she of the long silences, of the quiet strength. Maybe it was because she didn’t talk about her own past so much, maybe it was because she had her own secrets and didn’t press Molly for his. Molly didn’t believe in fate as a rule, but even he had to admit that it felt like _something_ had drawn them together. They slept in the same tent, comforted each other on their bad nights. One night, after Molly had woken up gasping, choking on the dirt in his dreams, he had confided his earliest memory to her. Everyone else in the carnival knew the colorful past Molly had spun for himself, as colorful as his coat, but only Yasha knew the true colors of Molly’s past, the darkness and the dirt.

Yasha didn’t trade him a truth for a truth, not that night, not directly. Still, there were clues, things about Yasha that stirred the strange knowledge that lived in Molly’s blood. There was the musical, almost liquid language she spoke in her sleep, the way she’d stare at clouds during a thunderstorm for hours, and almost be invariably gone the next morning. There was her hair, black fading to white, her eyes, mismatched and beautiful. By the time Yasha told him she was an aasimar, Molly realized he had already known. Their friendship (there was a word for it in Celestial, a better word) was a contradiction, and it delighted the both of them to no end.

**********

Molly had been Molly for two years before he walked into the Evening Nip, before he walked down into a bar below a bar and a tabaxi had called him “Lucien,” called him “Nonagon,” both names that should have meant nothing to him, shouldn’t have made his heart pound and his stomach twist into knots. The tabaxi, (Cree, her name was Cree, and that didn’t mean anything to Molly) spoke of a ritual, of Molly dying, of them burying him. So now he knew how he had come to be in the ground. He hadn’t wanted to know. Ignorance had been bliss, had been _peace_ , and now that peace was falling apart all around him.

Nott didn’t understand why Molly didn’t want to know about his past. Didn’t he want to know who he was?

That was the thing. Molly _didn’t_ want to know. For him, it was enough to know who he was _now._ Whoever he might have been in his past, those other names, he had left them all behind, in the bottom of the grave that had been dug for him. Let them stay there. Let them _rot._ Right here, right now, he was Mollymauk Tealeaf, and he was going to _live._

  


  


**Author's Note:**

> The Moonweaver's commandment that I quoted is straight up out of the Tal'Dorei Campaign Guide.
> 
> I'm angel-ascending over on Tumblr if you want to stop by and say hi!


End file.
